


Where Air is Dust

by vogue91



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 18:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13253889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vogue91/pseuds/vogue91
Summary: He just wanted to wake up from that grotesque nightmare, he wanted to find the same freedom on James and Lily’s faces, horribly twisted by death.





	Where Air is Dust

_[Ever close your eyes_

_Ever stop and listen_

_Ever feel alive_

_And you’ve nothing missing_

_You don’t need a reason_

_Let the day go on and on]_

He travelled. He had always liked to travel with his mind, going to unknown places, in a world where he could finally feel free from the chains anchoring him to a reality too evil in his regards.

As he had been evil toward himself.

He had consumed, slowly, inexorably, up to the edge of an abyss, flames at his back.

Jump or burn, and he’d jumped.

He had jumped, and had gotten surprised of being left untouched by the fall, of being landed on soft ground, warm, to which he wasn’t accustomed to.

Slowly, he had parted from all keeping him anchored to his name, to his family, to the constant look of blame, and he had thrown himself with open arms in a reality all new and unexplored. He had felt alive, important, afar from anything that could bring him pain.

It was an illusion, but it was all he was granted.

He closed his eyes, laid on the much desired bed into the Gryffindor Tower, and let himself go to James’ excited arguments, the scarce and well-chosen words of Remus, the incomprehensible muttering of Peter.

And he felt, for the first time, actually home.

 

_[Let the rain fall down_

_Everywhere around you_

_Give into it now_

_Let the day surround you_

_You don’t need a reason_

_Let the rain go on and on]_

It was raining. He felt it on his skin, on which the drops were enjoying drawing abstract figures, he felt it on his face, irreparably stained from the water, as destined to erode under the weight of those drops, which seemed to penetrate his flesh.

But he didn’t notice. He stared at the ruin in front of him as if rapt from that funereal image, as if he had lost his senses, as if that reality he had painstakingly built was crumbled down on him.

The wreckage of two broken lives, and his existence starting to show itself in all its disarming fallacy.

It was raining, and that ordinary water was weakening his limbs, shell of a devastated mind.

He didn’t feel the need to do anything. He just wanted to wake up from that grotesque nightmare, he wanted to find the same freedom on James and Lily’s faces, horribly twisted by death. He couldn’t see anything that had passed, not in those rubbles, and for the first time in almost ten years he felt once more like the little, surly Sirius Black, too mixed up in his own blood to become a person better than those he despised, that surrounded him since his birth.

He let rain flow on his skin, for he wasn’t able to fight it.

Alone, Sirius Black was nothing.

 

_[What a day_

_What a day to take to_

_What a way_

_What a way to make it through_

_What a day_

_What a day to take to_

_A wild child]_

He breathed dust. The dust of those years that passed and consumed him more and more, until there would’ve been nothing left on earth to remember of his presence.

Forgotten, in that cell narrow and suffocating, where his madness were the memories of what he had lived.

There was nothing for the Dementors to take away from him, because he felt he had nothing. Every day he stared at those grim shadows, those weightless veils, lacking any nuance, which hid Death itself, and he felt almost envious of all those who liked in Azkaban and had been able to lose their mind.

Instead, he was sentenced with rationality, that which he had never owned before he had been dragged to that place, bound to chains that for once were tangible, in a cage, like the animal he actually thought he was.

He wasn’t a rebel, he was a serial contrarian. And now destiny had fun playing with his existence, making him pay the price for all those moments he had stolen to an existence that didn’t really belong to him.

The world was not his home, but his own personal stage. And he had played his part so good as to being loved by the people surrounding him. The people who had paid that love with their own life, just because into the book of fate there was never written that Sirius Black deserved a lasting happiness.

 

_[Only take the time_

_From the helter skelter_

_Every day you find_

_Everything’s in kilter_

_You don’t need a reason_

_Let the day go on and on]_

Twelve years of bloody destructive wait, and he felt he couldn’t wait a few more hours.

Twelve years of total deprivation of any emotion, and he felt almost shattered by the sensation hitting him .in that moment, hurting him sharply, to his bones.

He wanted his revenge, and he would’ve had it.

It didn’t matter if he died now, because he couldn’t imagine one reason to still bind him to that earth, which hadn’t been able to give him but desperation and death.

And yet, with all this, he was starting to long to see his godson. To try and make him see how the world should’ve been challenged, but never right away, just so that he wouldn’t have had to see Harry die as well under the aegis of the same recklessness which had sent James underground.

Sirius was tired, but he was still waiting. A sign, anything to tell him it was worth it, that he should’ve hoped to see a new dawn in his horizon.

But there was nothing. Just a hollow heart, filled by a hate so blind as to not seem even human.

He would’ve liked to sigh, but he didn’t want to challenge that dust invading his lungs everytime he went looking for air. The dust of memories and broken hopes.

 

_[Every summer sun_

_Every winter evening_

_Every spring to come_

_Every autumn leaving_

_You don’t need a reason_

_Let it all go on and on]_

Sirius Black had spent his last years like he had spent the firsts.

He had built a world of his own, to retire in when the weight of reality became oppressing, when everybody seemed incapable of crossing the wall around him.

He had started again wandering with his mind, always toward uncharted waters, always hoping to find that serenity he should’ve stopped believing in since long ago.

Days had gone by, then months, but he didn’t understand anymore how time went by. He recognised winters by the darkness inside him, spring by renewed hopes, summer by the oppressing heat that he hoped forbade him to think and autumn for the melancholy it brought, as if it was the end of a journey he felt he had never started.

He had left many words and memories behind him, and yet he had always new ones coming to caress him, seductive, waiting for him to fall under the weight of their malice.

And when he did it was like time stopped, letting him fall in a limbo lacking of any tangible contact with reality, where only he existed, with his pain and the decisions he wasn’t capable of taking.

But not that night.

That night, he would’ve been a little bit like the man he was before, he would’ve worn again the mask of a man with something to lose.

He would’ve twisted his existence so deeply as to appear a martyr, so that no one would’ve noticed that the man who was throwing himself with open arms in the hands of Death was just another one incapable of making sense of the image he saw in the mirror.

And yet he fought, always hoping to find himself in those mechanical gestures he had carried out so many times in the past. With James, in another life.

Then, all of a sudden, the so feared green flash. Desired, he realized.

The darkness.

And he became dust.

 

_What a day, what a day to take to a wild child_


End file.
